Jake

Idle Thumbs 129: A Reminder

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I suppose in the case of a narrative based game, a lot of the interest would be lost after watching an LP.  The ones I watch are groups of people not individuals so they only do multiplayer stuff.  In those cases they're an excellent advertisement of how much fun the game is.

 

One of the exceptions to that is when game creators play their own game and talk about the creation process or weird little things they put in the game or other things of that nature.  It's like a live developer commentary and I love those.

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I know a lot of people who WANT to play games MORE after seeing LPs, even for very narrative-heavy games.

 

I think they're weird. I don't particularly care about spoilers, except in a few rare cases, but I never go out looking for them.

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I would never have gotten into the Souls games without having watched Squint's excellent Demon's Souls LP. Similarly, Jerusalem's amazing tale of Scottish conquest showed me how much fun it is possible to have by completely subverting a game's intentions (and got me to sign up for SA to boot).

To me good LPs have always been about showing me things I could never get to myself, either because I don't own (nor want to) a particular console/game or don't have the skills or creativity. Other examples include the Boatmurdered saga in Dwarf Fortress and the hate-filled playthrough of Daikatana by Proteus and Suspicious.

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streaming didn't come out of minecraft. it came out of world of warcraft, aka, video displays of how to beat difficult encounters, where to stand, know your class role. YOGS = Ye Olde GOON SQUAD = somethingawful goons = wow guild

That totally makes sense, thanks for explaining that history/etymology. Did it evolve into streaming for entertainment within the WoW era as well or did that come later?

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Celebrity LPs I'd like to watch:

-President Obama plays Civilization 5

-Former president George W. Bush plays Civilization 5

-Actually, I'd like to watch the presidential canidates play Civilization 5 during the next election. I wonder how Elizabeth Warren would play it.

-Dr. Cornel West plays GTA V

-Bjork plays Electroplankton

-Frank Gehry plays Minecraft

-Andy Goldsworthy plays Minecraft ... or maybe something that diesn't have as much freedom of resource-placement, like... I don't know. I gues i'll settle for Minecraft.

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The Stanley Parable "Raphael Trailer" that was discussed in the cast:

 

Basically the best thing ever.

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You can get the "unachieveable" achievement. But the logic behind it has been changed since the release.

...

or maybe the devs are playing a trick on us

 

Davey's made some posts on the Steam boards about how he's been changing the unlock requirements with every patch released. Initially, you had to manually edit keybinds outside the game to allow a key to activate the unlock, because enabling the console and trying commands is something the game has a response for.

 

There's also at least one thing the game keeps track of, and eventually gives an ending for:

Every time you end up restarting, one of the various computers around the office has an "Awaiting input" message. Clicking on it fills a chunk of a progress bar, and then a different computer is active the next restart. once you so it four or five times, you get the Heaven ending, where Stanley is transported to a bright white room surrounded by endlessly pressable buttons.

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I kind of feel like you should have gone into full spoiler territory with the Stanley Parable (with appropriate warning or whatever). Here's my reasoning behind this:

 

I feel like the thing that gets spoiled as it were isn't any specific beats the game might cover, but rather once you know that the game is all about the relationship between the player and the narrator that's kind of like the important twist in the game that makes it different from every other game you might play. I sort of knew about that going in, and playing the game, and while I still really enjoyed playing the game, I think it would have been pretty awesome if I had gone into playing that game without any prior knowledge and discovering that for myself.

 

Not a big deal, but if I knew someone that knew nothing about the Stanley Parable, I would probably recommend they just go play the game before listening to this episode (and they should play it!)

 

I really like the point that Jake (I think?) brought up about the game simultaneously like poking fun at video game conventions while also reveling in them. I think the developers struck a perfect balance here that so many AAA studios seem to have fallen on the wrong side of. GTA V and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon are two examples that jump to mind of games that get that sort of thing wrong. Those are games that force you to engage in some irritating convention while making fun of how dumb that convention is. That just feels irritating and cynical. What the Stanley Parable does, and this is an important distinction, is it is just really good at pointing out all the weird conventions that we accept are weird but are also like not necessarily obtrusive. The game never asks you to do something you would find annoying to do though, and that's why I think it is more successful as being humorous and critical about video games.

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The part where it opened with Jake talking to Nick and thinking it would be funny if for this episode Nick became Explanatory Chris and Chris moved away from the microphone and only laughed while leaning back on his chair or whatever.

 

Then Jake fooling Nick into a monologue discussion and Nick starting to do it back by only making listening noises but Jake realising what was happening and starting to smile but then keeping it together or maybe that's just what the game wanted me to think.

 

 

 

 

This is excellent. It should play automatically whenever idlethumbs.net detects a Netscape user agent.

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Saw this on vanaman's twitter:

  

So you guys tried this thing for real?

Yeah we'll talk about it on next week's show.

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I like the idea of a shadowcast.

 

The hosts would be Sean "Infamous" Vanaman, Nick "Congrats Nick" Breckon, Jake "Computer Games" Rodkin, and of course Patrick "Scoops" Klepek.

The timelines diverged when Chris made the decision to rent Far Cry Instincts. In the Shadowcast, Chris never rented it, thus never blowing out his TV speakers. This in turn allowed him to experience the full force of the Hypersonic Effect when he watched the Akira Blu-Ray, which drove him mad.

Jake has a robot arm in this universe also.

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I like to imagine there's a single person out there that got fed a version of this episode that replaces the RSS talk with bizarre Phaedrus ramblings, and that they don't post in forums or have friends that listen to the 'cast to talk about it with, and they just go on with their lives thinking "man, that sure was a weird one." Only Chris would ever realize the joke even actually existed.

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I like the idea of a shadowcast.

 

The hosts would be Sean "Infamous" Vanaman, Nick "Congrats Nick" Breckon, Jake "Computer Games" Rodkin, and of course Patrick "Scoops" Klepek.

The timelines diverged when Chris made the decision to rent Far Cry Instincts. In the Shadowcast, Chris never rented it, thus never blowing out his TV speakers. This in turn allowed him to experience the full force of the Hypersonic Effect when he watched the Akira Blu-Ray, which drove him mad.

Jake has a robot arm in this universe also.

"Sir it appears this alternate universe was created entirely from what we call DCRs, or 'Deep Cut References.'"

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For a while I had convinced myself that The Stanley Parable Demonstration (I feel you should always say the full name) was the actual new full release of The Stanley Parable. I was also 100% okay with that idea. It was a combination of how much more content was in The Stanley Parable Demonstration  in comparison to the original mod, and the price not showing up in Steam until its release.

 

Not that I think the Remix is bad or anything, in fact not only did I really enjoy all the polish, but one of the new endings is my favourite. They really put the narrator through a lot more different emotional states in some of them. Now I'm kinda wondering about leaving the game running in a couple spots where the narrative seems to demand it.

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Jake has a robot arm in this universe also.

He lost the real one to a malfunctioning Big Dog.

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Sean's always talking about how he could totally beat President Romney at hockey.

 

 

"Sir it appears this alternate universe was created entirely from what we call DCRs, or 'Deep Cut References.'"

 

I have no idea if this means I did a stupid thing or a good thing.

Probably a stupid thing.

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He lost the real one to a malfunctioning Big Dog.

And then STOLE the malfunctioning Big Dog's legs to build his arm.

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I have no idea if this means I did a stupid thing or a good thing.

Probably a stupid thing.

 

The only stupid thing was failing to mention that alterna-Sean's nickname is actually "Bandanaman", because he's the one with the two big-screen TVs.

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Jake has a robot arm in this universe also.

In which he holds a full-sized human arm, which he demands people shake at parties.

 

 

 

... Also, since we're talking about Let's Players, I just wanted to mention that my favorite is Northernlion. He's generally witty and fun to listen to, and though he often makes off-color jokes he seems to make an effort to make sure they aren't at anyone's expense.

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God, huge props to the guy who emailed about the Smash Bros. documentary.

 

IT'S INCREDIBLE.

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